Arbitrary Precise Pattern Former Using Integrated Optical Phased Arrays for On‐Demand Beam Forming

Integrated optical phased arrays (OPAs) have shown promise in applications such as optical wireless communications and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). Existing beam‐forming methods with such OPAs often require iterations of phase‐tuning and far‐field measurements or need expensive resources to handle nonlinear dependence on elemental phases, which are inefficient and costly for generating a large set of diverse beam patterns. Here, a generic complex far‐field pattern‐forming method, the Arbitrary Precise Pattern former (APP‐former), is proposed for OPAs without iterative measurements. To tackle the complicated phase dependence, the problem is converted with auxiliary variables while ensuring the meaningful characteristics of phase variables. By introducing Bregman divergence for linearization, a closed‐form solution is obtained for each optimization step, which avoids nested double‐iterations and enhances convergence saliently. Four representative categories of patterns are demonstrated in experiments without iterative rephasing and measurements. The potential application of multi‐beam is illustrated in a multi‐user optical wireless communication network, with directional nulling to enable privacy‐oriented communications. Furthermore, the APP‐former can be adapted to uncover the dormant potential of the phase shifter array for power optimization. This versatile and efficient approach opens the door to on‐demand beam‐forming with integrated OPAs for a wide range of applications.